[imagesource: Ethan Pines]

There are power couples and then there are the Fiskers.

The one half of the duo is famous car designer Henrik Fisker, who has been off the grid ever since his electric vehicle company, Fisker Automotive, collapsed seven years ago.

Prior to that, he had enjoyed a very successful career, which became public when he designed the silver, convertible BMW Z8 roadster for Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in The World Is Not Enough.

He also headed up Aston Martin’s design studios before serving as an early design consultant to Elon Musk’s Tesla, working on the Model S.

After his hiatus, he’s back and looking to give Tesla a run for its money, and he has something that he didn’t have before: his wife, CFO of Fisker Inc., Geeta Gupta-Fisker.

His Los Angeles company, says Forbes, is public this time around, already raising more than $1 billion in an October initial public offering. His stock price has also risen to 56% since the company reemerged from the ditches.

“We have very different styles of working. I would almost say it’s a right-brain/left-brain-type segregation,” Geeta, 46, tells Forbes.

“Right brain is the creative side, so that’s Henrik. The left side is the data-driven analytical brain. That would be me.”

The team plans on selling their Fisker Ocean, a battery-powered SUV (below), by 2022. The retail price is currently set at $37 500. One of Tesla’s cheaper models, the Model 3, starts at $36 200.

“One thing that’s on Geeta’s plate is to take more of the cost out,” says Henrik, who is Fisker Inc.’s CEO. “One of the things on my plate is to ensure that we have a stellar product.”

The couple isn’t looking to make huge amounts of money, with Henrik pointing out that he didn’t get into cars to line his pockets. Apparently, his mother wanted him to be a dentist.

The big stake that they’ve claimed in this new iteration of the company is to ensure that they have control over its direction.

Fisker Automotive was a hard lesson because its namesake, who was also design chief, CEO and a board member lacked one crucial title: owner. “He didn’t own even one share of the company,” Geeta says.

Image: Fisker Inc.

“Ownership is the only way to influence decisions, the right decisions,” she says. “That’s why when we structured the deal…what was really important for us was super-voting rights. Because what you don’t want is a repetition of what happened last time, when other people come in and make the decisions.”

Geeta is from India and holds multiple degrees in science, including a PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge University, where she was also a Research Newton Fellow. She has managed investments for some of the world’s highest-ranking clientele.

The couple has had to overcome a lot to get to this point. After investing their life savings into the new company, Geeta found out that she had breast cancer.

“She got the call (from her doctor) during a call with investors,” Henrik says. Despite that bombshell, she continued working with banks and investors in the weeks that followed, even as she underwent two surgical procedures and radiation therapy. Her medical therapy concluded in November.

She’s currently cancer-free but keeping an eye on things.

Geeta notes that if this company fails they’re both out of a job for the foreseeable future.

“Henrik and I will never get a job after if this fails, we are done,” she says. “We’re not doing this to get rich. We’re doing this because we want to make an amazing company that makes amazing cars. We want to make really cool green cars, affordable cars.”

If anything, with the obstacles that they’ve had to overcome and the mistakes that they’ve learned from, Elon Musk shouldn’t get too comfortable in his current position at Tesla.

I reckon Geeta is the one to watch out for.

She’s formidable in the best possible way.

[source:forbes]